Thomson Reuters, one of the world’s leading sources of intelligent information, has launched Open PermID, a set of APIs and tools that organizations can use to access Thomson Reuters’ massive core entity data set. Open PermID provides access to Thomson Reuters-linked entity data via bulk downloads, hypermedia APIs, and online tools.

PermID is a machine readable, 64 bit number used to create a unique reference. Thomson Reuters has been using PermID for quite some time to improve internal data federation providing a single common context for the information stored in silos across the company’s many divisions. Thomson Reuters is now making PermID and its linked entity data publicly available for free. Available entity identifiers include organizations (companies, government agencies, universities, etc), instrument data, and quote data.

There are currently three Open PermID APIs; Record Matching, Entity Search, and Open Calais Tagging. The Open PermID Record Matching APITrack this API allows organizations to match their own entity data to Thomson Reuters identifiers. The Open PermID Entity Search APITrack this API provides access to permanent ID’s from the core entity data set which, according to the official website, includes “3.5 million organizations, 240K equity instruments and 1.17 million equity quotes.” The Open PermID Open Calais Tagging APITrack this API provides access to the free version of Thomson Reuters Intelligent Tagging, a platform that uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to automatically analyze and tag unstructured content.

Thomson Reuters Open PermID APIs are hypermedia APIs available in several types including Collection+JSON, JSON-LD, and Turtle. There are code samples available on the Open PermID developer site including Java, .NET, PHP, Python, and JavaScript (languages vary for each API). Here is an example of a browser API call and the JSON response:

ProgrammableWeb reached out to Dan Meisner, head of open data at Thomson Reuters, who provided some insight into Open PermID. Meisner explained that Thomson Reuters has been using a dogfooding approach when it comes to their APIs. The company has been using the Open PermID APIs for many years and PermID has been used by the company for about eight years. The information model organized around PermID has allowed Thomson Reuters to better manage the massive amounts of data stored across various divisions of the company. Meisner said that “the result has been a drastic reduction in the cost and complexity of managing our content and has accelerated innovation.”

Meisner told ProgrammableWeb that the company plans on making many more entities available next year, including (but not limited to):

People Authority – Officers & Directors

The Rest of the Instrument Data – Derivatives, fixed income, all exchange-traded instruments

Meisner explained that Thomson Reuters intends to roll out their entire entity collection of data. However, the company is currently working on streamlining the process. While Open PermID provides free access to Thomson Reuters-linked entity data, there are some commercial benefits to opening up the company’s vast store of entity data to the public. He explained that there are rate limits in place so that companies requiring a high volume of calls beyond the freemium model would need to use commercial products instead. He also said that there are a few data sets that are only available commercially. Open PermID will also help the company build a robust external ecosystem.

“Managing an authoritative list of anything is hard, but an objective understanding of the things described by data is absolutely essential for the effective sharing of information,” said Meisner. “We developed the PermID in response to this challenge and have found it to be an indispensable tool for connecting our information across systems and knowledge domains.”